I'm full to the brim with biomedical projects. This year 2015 is supposed to be a breakthrough, but I've gotta work extra hard this time round.
For starters, I began a UROP under Prof Raye on Muscle-activated Robotics, which involves using electromyography (EMG) signals. Pretty tough, considering that there's quite a lot about the raw data that I don't know nuts about. Not only that, there's still a bunch of electronics that I have no idea how to get it working to produce a clean and filtered output that's clear enough to differentiate between different hand movements as of yet.
On top of that, there is yet another hemodynamics-related design project on Percutaneous Mitral Valve Replacement. That's quite a mouthful. Basically it's designing a heart valve that's small enough to be fed through the major blood vessels and deployed at your heart to keep your body pumping blood without major problems - all while making sure that the method to do so will leave as little wounds as possible. In short, a minimally invasive method.
Operations Management - It's an interesting module, until you realise that you can't really make out what numbers are being used in calculating the throughput rate, and the idea of inventories becomes very blurry, and vastly different from the definition you are used to (inventories in MMORPGs vs inventories in terms of Operations Management...)
Aaaaaand suddenly my experience during my previous internship doesn't seem to be all that useful for this semester's projects. For one, how the hell are you going to use 3D Printing to produce a stent frame prototype to hold a tissue valve - and make it mechanically stable enough to withstand shear and pressure forces in a porcine heart specimen? No nitinol - takes too long to fabricate, and no plastic because it wouldn't accurately model an actual stent frame in terms of mechanical strength and biocompatibility...
And oh, the most epic quote of all day I heard from my professor during Biomaterials lecture earlier this afternoon:
"I didn't have a lot to play with, so I played with mercury - a lot."
